Jane Austen didn’t take herself or her novels seriously, and neither should we. That’s why they pack such a punch. It is their understated passion that simmers below the surface that so enchants us. For the character to be too self-aware and serious is to betray the self-effacing spirit of Austen and her work.

The professor of my college English literature class opined that Jane Austen’s Emma was “the perfect novel.” He enthused about its careful structure, the subtle characterization, and Austen’s masterful combination of dialogue, wit, social commentary, and morality.

Austen’s novels have provided a deep source for dramatic and cinematic spinoffs. Last month the students of our small Upper School pulled off a brilliant stage version of Sense and Sensibility and a range of film directors have brought Austen’s delightful stories to life on screen. To date there have been eight film adaptations of “the perfect novel” including Clueless—which transfers the plot to a Beverly Hills High School— and Aisha, an upbeat Bollywood re-make of Clueless. The most recent conventionally costumed versions are the 1996 film with Gwyneth Paltrow in the title role, a 2009 BBC production, and the 2020 film version directed by Autumn de Wilde and starring Anna Taylor Joy.

The supreme Austen film adaptations must be Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility and the BBC’s classic Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. To my mind, they set the standard for Austen films. Both not only portray the beauty and mannered restraint of regency England, but they also capture the wit and vivacity of Austen’s writing and the feisty spirit of her heroines.

Autumn de Wilde’s most recent treatment of Emma is in this respect a disappointment. The production is lavish in its photography, costumes, sets, and locations. The lush costumes and settings probably overstate the luxury of Hartfield, Randalls, and Donwell Abbey, but the opulence makes the film a delight to look at.

The problem I had with Autumn de Wilde’s treatment is that Anna Taylor Joy was so unlikeable as the eponymous heroine. Jane Austen herself admitted that she was probably the only person who would actually like Emma. The actress has the difficult task of creating a character who is attractive: girlish, bubbly, and charming while also being manipulative, snobbish, and selfish. Anna Taylor Joy managed the snobbish, self-absorbed and mean girl part, but we missed the winsome charm of Emma that sparkles in the novel. Anna Taylor Joy’s Emma was far too serious. Jane Austen didn’t take herself or her novels seriously, and neither should we. That’s why they pack such a punch. It is their understated passion that simmers below the surface that so enchants us. For the character to be too self-aware and serious is to betray the self-effacing spirit of Austen and her work.

Anna Taylor Joy’s serious Emma betrays what I suspect was the director’s intended feminist subtext. A recent favorable review of the film gushes,

Austen’s tale gets a 21st-century treatment thanks to a clever script adapted by Eleanor Catton that delivers on progressive themes like female empowerment and challenges the sexist laws and social hierarchies of Austen’s time. By shifting sex politics and rotating gender power dynamics of the Georgian and Regency-era, de Wilde and Catton balance out stale fixtures of the period drama genre and correlate contemporary sensibilities within the centuries-old material.

In other words an ideologically driven scriptwriter and director managed to manipulate Austen’s charming romance into a feminist tract. This uploading of a contemporary sexual sermon spoils the whole film because an alert audience knows what’s going on. The preachy subtext in this case was quite subtle, but it was still as serious in its intent as Anna Joy Taylor’s heavy-handed treatment of the title role. As such it cast a suspiciously serious pall over the whole production.

I have written elsewhere in these pages of the destructive results of making Shakespeare woke. Imposing one’s own ideology on past classics is like drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa and thinking oneself clever. It’s worth remembering Ogden Nash’s quip: “Here is a good rule of thumb, Too clever is dumb.”

The masterpieces of the past are our shared heritage, and while they do come to us with a historic context, worldview, and embedded ideologies and beliefs, part of the appreciation of these masterworks is the understanding of the worldview and belief systems in which they are lodged, and from which they have sprung.

It is not vital that one accepts those beliefs or seeks to follow their worldview, but it is vital to retain them and portray them as faithfully as possible so that the re-imagining of them is an homage and not an act of arrogant cultural vandalism.

Fr Dwight Longenecker’s latest book The Way of the Wilderness Warrior is a fictional account of a college student who embarks on a quest of spiritual enlightenment. Learn more at dwightlongenecker.com

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The featured image is “Reading the Letter” (1885) by Thomas Benjamin Kennington, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.